The Sleeping Dead Read online

  Susan tried to crouch down, but her arms stretched under the pressure. Jackson wondered if the weight of the two women would be enough to pull her over the railing or if that would only happen when the joints in Susan’s shoulders started to twist and snap.

  It was impossible for Helen or the other woman to lean back any farther. Their arms were both at full stretch and Susan was pulled tight, as if she were on a rack. It occurred to Jackson that if she could find a way to break their grip on her wrists, then they would fall away and she would be free.

  Helen stepped off the ledge and dropped two feet. Her feet hung in the air and Susan lurched forward, bent double over the railing.

  Any second now, Jackson thought. She couldn’t possibly hold out any longer.

  Helen’s shoes swayed in midair, as if she were trying to walk across the blank space. Susan’s screams rose another notch.

  The second woman shuffled backward on the ledge, standing only by the very tips of her shoes. Jackson saw it in slow motion: the second woman stepping back off the ledge, the combined weight of the two of them pulling Susan over the railing so that they would all fall. There would be a moment’s silence and then the heavy whump of impact and then it would be over. The horror would be finished.

  “Jesus,” Jackson whispered. He understood he was willing the two women to succeed. What does that make me?

  Susan was bent over the railing. She seemed to be standing on her tiptoes. Every muscle was strained, every tendon elongated to the point of snapping.

  Jackson moved, but already knew he’d left it too late. He could see the second woman taking her first foot off the ledge. The strain upon Susan increased. Now Jackson was sure her feet were no longer on the floor.

  He clattered down the staircase. It was too far. Too late. He turned the first corner and Susan turned her head and looked at him.

  He jumped the next set of steps and felt the impact in his knees. The shock ran the length of his long bones and finished somewhere in his jaw.

  The second woman stepped from the ledge. Her body hung in the air.

  Jackson was still two flights of stairs away from the women. He made three crippled steps across the landing and then jumped the next flight of stairs. From the corner of his eye, he saw Susan’s body slip over the railing.

  He staggered across the landing. His legs felt numb. He didn’t have the strength to lift them. The maneuver was closer to a tumble.

  He fell across Susan’s body. As he touched her, he felt the tension running through her. At some point she had stopped screaming; she needed all her energy just to cling on.

  He slid his leg beneath the railings, out into the open, deadly space, and kicked at Helen’s hand. And with the second swing of his foot, he connected. He felt the moment through Susan’s body, the instant when Helen let go.

  A second later he heard the thump as Helen’s body hit the floor five stories below. The whole building seemed to shudder with the impact.

  I did that, Jackson thought.

  The other woman glared at Jackson and then, very deliberately, she released her grip on Susan’s foot and fell to her death.

  I killed her too, Jackson thought. Maybe not directly, but I’m at fault for her death, and I didn’t even learn her name.

  The idea felt strange, not entirely rational. It was as if he were listening to himself speak in a foreign language.

  For a moment both he and Susan were frozen in shock. They stared at each other in an awkward, suspicious silence. Susan with her arms wrapped around the banister as if she were still afraid of being pulled over the side.

  “What took you so long?” she asked eventually. The anger in her voice was bright. And then she folded to the ground and began to sob.

  9

  He listened to Susan weep. She buried her head in her hands, muffling the sound, but he could still hear her clearly.

  He retreated up the flight of stairs, afraid to get any closer. He was torn between the desire to go back down to Susan and comfort her and the echo of her accusation: What took you so long?

  Because he didn’t have an answer. Not one that he could live with.

  She seemed oblivious to his presence, wrapped in her own sorrow. He toyed with the idea of simply walking past her, tiptoeing down the stairs while she was absorbed in her grief and shock. It didn’t seem to Jackson to be a particularly noble plan, in fact it stank of cowardice even when he tried to convince himself that Susan would not want to have anything to do with him.

  He sat and watched her shoulders shudder. Eventually he trudged down the flight of stairs and sat on the step beside Susan, careful not to touch her.

  He listened to her ragged breathing and the way she snorted to clear her clotted nostrils. He reached out to touch her arm, fingertips barely pressing against her skin, and he could feel her body thrumming with grief. Still she didn’t look up.

  “I’m sorry.” His words were almost a whisper. The apology settled and he discovered saying it didn’t make him feel any better. He waited, and when there was no response, he forced himself to repeat the words.

  “What for?” Susan asked. Her words were louder than he had expected, more forceful.

  “What are you apologizing for? Saving me? Or nearly letting me die.”

  She looked up and stared directly at him. Her eyes were bright with anger. Her lips pressed into a hard, thin line. Jackson guessed that she hated him, except she hadn’t known him long enough for that—she only hated what he had done.

  “I should have done something sooner.”

  “Why?” Susan said. “No one else did. They laughed.” She spat out the words and they were full of bitterness. “When Angie and Helen dragged me out of the office, the others laughed, even though they knew what was happening.”

  Angie, Jackson thought. The other woman’s name had been Angie. He noticed Susan glaring at him, as if she had realized he was no longer paying attention to what she said.

  She was too close. He could smell her—a stink of sweat and perfume and garlic. He wanted to back away, but the idea of moving and rejecting her all over again disgusted him. This closeness was his penance.

  “What’s happening?” Susan asked.

  Jackson shrugged. He had been hoping she knew.

  Susan’s eyes glazed over, as if she was remembering something. “Do you hear them?”

  There was an urgency in her voice. Jackson cocked his head to one side and listened, expecting to hear voices wafting through the emergency doorway from Susan’s offices beyond. There was nothing. The office block was silent. Not even the sound of water pipes or the mechanical whine of the elevators patrolling their dark shafts.

  He shook his head.

  “The voices?” Susan pressed. “Do you hear the voices?”

  When he looked into her eyes, he thought that maybe what he saw there was not just pain and fear, but maybe madness too. But he understood.

  “Not now,” he said. “In the past, but not now.”

  Susan nodded. “Me too. They come and go. Stronger and weaker. So far I’ve been able to beat them, but I think the time will come when they will be too strong to fight.”

  Jackson thought of Helen and Angie lying in a heap of broken bones at the bottom of the stairwell. They showed what happened when the voices became too loud.

  “But you do hear them?” Susan pressed. She started to cry, and this time Jackson did put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her. He expected her to shrug him off, maybe even push him away, but she simply sat there and sobbed.

  10

  They passed the fourth floor and found the door had been propped open with the handle of a mop. There was blood on both ends of the handle and a splatter of coin-sized drops on the floor. Neither of them spoke.

  At the third floor they found a man hanging from the banister, a makeshift noose around his neck. His face was almost blue and Jackson assumed that he’d done it wrong and suffocated rather than breaking his neck. He tried not to think of th
e man hanging there, feet dancing in open space, waiting to die. He hoped the voices had stayed with the man until the end, assuring him that he had made the right decision. That once the act had started, they had not abandoned him.

  On the second floor they found a man sitting against the wall.

  Jackson held out his hand. “Wait!”

  “What for?” Susan asked.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. But he didn’t drop his hand and Susan didn’t try to force her way past him.

  “Hi,” Jackson called down. When the man did not respond, Jackson tried again. “You okay? Need a hand?”

  The man did not react. He sat with his back against the breeze blocks, staring out across the stairwell.

  Jackson took a step closer. The man’s eyes were open. He didn’t look dead, but nothing about him suggested he was still alive. There was a briefcase popped open beside him, revealing a sheaf of papers weighed down by a John Grisham paperback.

  Susan moved to stand beside Jackson and then crouched down to peer into the face of the man.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Jackson stifled a laugh. “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with all of us?” He bent down beside Susan and stared into the man’s eyes. Blue-green. Jackson turned his head to try and follow the man’s gaze. It looked like he was focusing somewhere beyond the far wall. He reached out a hand and tapped him on the shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  The man slipped away from Jackson until he lay on the floor in the same L shape he had occupied when he was seated.

  “Let’s go,” Susan said.

  “We can’t just leave him like this.”

  For an instant Jackson was sure Susan was going to make another remark about the way he had left her to Angie and Helen. She stared at him, as if deciding what she would say, before replying, “I guess not.”

  Jackson grabbed the sleeve of the man’s jacket, not wanting to touch his body. It was too close to maneuvering a corpse. When he was back in roughly the same place he had been when they found him, Jackson let go. He stepped back, paused, and then headed down the stairs.

  “How are you doing?” Susan asked when they reached the next floor.

  “All right.” He didn’t like the sound of voices in the stairwell. He didn’t trust the way they boomed against the flat walls and bounced back in an alien tone.

  “Because you don’t seem it.”

  He hunched his shoulders against the criticism and carried on walking, focusing on putting one foot down in front of the other. Once he was out of the building, things would be better. The walls of the stairwell seemed closer than before.

  “We can stop if you want.”

  “No!” He just needed to get outside and find Donna and then the nightmare would be over.

  A noise came from somewhere above him. A high screech like an animal caught in a trap.

  He caught Susan’s eye and the contact seemed to transmit some of his anxiety across the short gap because she started to move faster. She looked up, toward the sound.

  “What was that?”

  It’s the mob, Jackson wanted to say. It’s the horde of Angies and Jackies. It’s Malcolm Laine with his skull smashed open and leaking brains down the side of his face. It’s John Fairls with the blade of the scissors buried in his neck. It’s everything that’s gone wrong.

  They ran in unison down the next flight of stairs. Heavy breaths echoed back to them from the walls. The sound of their feet slapping on the steps came in short, explosive bursts.

  Jackson looked behind him. He thought he saw a shadow, high up in the stairwell. A black stain against a wall that looked like the silhouette of a mob. It was only his imagination, he knew that. It had to be his imagination.

  He tripped and would have fallen except that Susan held out a hand to steady him.

  “They’re coming,” Susan said.

  Jackson wished she hadn’t spoken. He wanted to believe that the image of the mob was his paranoia alone.

  They reached the ground floor, a large G painted on the back of the door. In the center of the stairwell was a column of bodies. Angie and Jackie were uppermost in the pile, their broken bodies bent over the railings. Angie’s head rested at an awkward angle. Her eyes were open.

  Jackson looked away. He didn’t need to know. He shouldn’t have to count how many bodies were stacked up in the stairwell.

  Susan was staring at Jackie. “That would have been me.”

  “But it isn’t,” Jackson said, more harshly than he had intended. He turned his back on the pile of dead bodies; it was time to leave.

  11

  Jackson approached the door cautiously, unsure of what was waiting for them. He laid his hand flat against the door, as if he would be able to feel what was on the other side. Nothing.

  He looked back at Susan, who shrugged. I don’t know. Her face was pale, washed by the harsh strip lighting in the stairwell.

  “Ready?”

  Susan nodded.

  He pushed the door open a crack and braced himself for a surge of noise. Nothing. He opened the door wider and gradually the building’s atrium was revealed to him; the long reception desk with the company names listed on the chalkboard above it; the expanse of white marble floor. Nothing had changed here. Looking into the foyer felt like slipping back a couple of hours to a time before the madness had arrived.

  The reception desk was empty, at least as far as Jackson could see from where he was standing.

  “What is it?” Susan asked from over his shoulder.

  “Nothing.” He pushed the door wider to allow her to pass him. She peeked out, like a rabbit peering from its hole to see if the danger was over.

  He stepped out of the stairwell. The door to the building came into view. Or what was left of it. The radiator grille of a silver BMW jutted through a screen of shattered glass. Jackson couldn’t see into the car—the windshield was obscured by a jigsaw puzzle of cracks.

  “Do you think they got what they wanted?” Susan asked.

  “I don’t think that would have killed anyone,” Jackson said, but he didn’t want to get close enough to find out. He’d seen enough dead bodies already.

  Susan walked across the foyer, her footsteps echoing through the loud space.

  “Where are you going?” Jackson asked.

  “There is a set of CCTV monitors behind the desk. Andy used to show me.”

  Jackson assumed Andy was the surly security guard he had seen when he had arrived for his interview. He tried to imagine him sitting there with Susan, watching silent gray and white images of people walking the building’s corridors.

  He joined Susan behind the desk, feeling like he was trespassing. What had happened to Andy and the receptionist? The woman’s handbag lay on the floor by her seat, open to reveal the handle of an umbrella.

  The screens flickered as they rolled through a succession of images. Most were empty corridors or the interior of the elevators. It was eerie to see all these stilled images of the building. But then there was the shot of the hallway. The screen showed it as camera 17 but Jackson had no idea where that might be. There was a small pile of bodies heaped in the corner of a room. Each time the image came around he wanted to look away but forced himself to stare for the five seconds it took for the screen to flicker on to the next camera.

  They watched in silence, and Jackson wanted to ask Susan why they were looking at the CCTV, what she had thought they would discover, but he was too afraid to speak.

  There was movement at the edge of the picture. A patch of darkness seemed to infect the other scenes and Jackson stared at the screen, waiting to see the black shadow creep into view again. He stared at images of empty corridors and a shot of the foyer, which showed him and Susan leaning over the reception desk.

  Finally Susan reached out and turned the screen off.

  “What’s happening?” She spoke without turning around, still staring into the gray hollow of the fading CCTV monitor.


  Jackson looked at Susan and recognized what an effort she was making just to appear in control. She was sweating. It was a climate-controlled building and the temperature couldn’t have been more than 65 degrees, but Susan was sweating and biting her lip. She pushed a ragged string of blonde hair away from her face and Jackson got the impression that everything she did was a struggle.

  “Are the voices bad?”

  She nodded.

  He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He thought about how it had felt when he had been standing in the stairwell on the eighth floor trying not to jump.

  “Sometimes I think that I should just do what they tell me. I can’t fight them forever.”

  “No, that’s the voices talking to you.”

  Susan shook her head. “No it isn’t. I know the difference between the voices and my own thoughts, that’s why I’m still here. It’s all those others who couldn’t tell them apart. But you can’t tell me that you think it’s going to get better.”

  He stayed silent, because it felt too dangerous to agree with Susan, even if what she was saying was right.

  “I need to find Donna,” he told her.

  “Who?” Susan gave him a thin, strained smile. “I don’t want to go outside. While we’re in here, it feels safe.”

  Jackson grimaced at the idea—safe among the dead bodies. Safe in the silence. He understood what Susan meant, he just didn’t want her to be right. He wanted to open the doors of The Pinnacle onto a confusion of police and ambulance and fire engines all working to put right the chaos. He wanted to learn that everyone hadn’t given up yet.

  He walked across the foyer, mindful of the loud snap of his feet on the hard floor. Susan walked beside him and he held out his hand to her. Her thin fingers closed around his palm. Hot.